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Hispanic American Historical Review 81.1 (2001) 151-152



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Book Review

Pueblos de indios y educación en el México colonial


Pueblos de indios y educación en el México colonial, 1750-1821. By DOROTHY TANCK DE ESTRADA. Mexico City: Centro de Estudios Históricos, El Colegio de México, 1999. Illustrations. Maps. Tables. Bibliography. Index. 665 pp. Paper.

The persistence of native pueblos and native languages stands as one of the most remarkable outcomes of Mexican history. Dorothy Tanck de Estrada examines a crucial period of challenge to Indian society, the late Bourbon period, when native Mexican communities faced repeated demands to subjugate themselves further to the Spanish Crown. Bourbon policies sought to regularize and control pueblo finances, religious life, and land use. Indians even found their languages under attack. At its most strident, the Crown declared in 1770 its goal "to extinguish native languages." This book details Bourbon policies regarding village life and the pueblos' fight to retain their autonomy.

The volume's title misleads in two ways. First, while pueblos de indios are Tanck's subject, this is hardly an ethnohistorical study. Royal policymakers and officers stand out as protagonists; Indians themselves play little role in nearly half of the book. Second, readers interested in Indian education may be frustrated by detailed chapters on pueblo and cofradía finances that lack explicit connection to schooling. Only one-third of the text focuses on the establishment and achievements of escuelas de primeras letras in Indian pueblos. These readers can move quickly to the book's midsection, filled with revealing vignettes of teachers, educational materials, and villagers' attitudes toward the schools.

According to Tanck, Bourbon economic reforms were the primary motor of change in Indian society. Fiscal policies emanating from Spain effectively streamlined and redirected the collection and use of community funds. Reform of the caja de comunidad, for example, enabled the Crown to siphon off the lion's share of local savings. Fiscal reforms (achieved at the expense of pueblo autonomy), Tanck argues, proved essential to the establishment of primary schools. She relies upon the ample reports of intendants and other bureaucrats to document school funding from Durango to Chiapas. She estimates that 26 percent of Mexican pueblos had schools in 1803 (p. 582).

Tanck maintains that Bourbon plans to found village schools and propagate Spanish language succeeded for the most part. Earlier, local clergy guided escuelas de doctrina where children mainly learned the catechism, often in their native tongue. After 1750, royalist bishops and Bourbon officers mandated the creation of a new kind of school in any village that could bear the cost of a teacher. With Spanish as the language of instruction, the curriculum still included the catechism, but also reading and, for some students, writing. Most students were male, but some villages maintained classes or separate school for girls as well. Tanck stresses the longevity of many schools and the continuity in their funding. She contends that decades of schooling in hundreds of pueblos had an impact. Working with a [End Page 151] complex set of variables, Tanck reckons literacy rates as high as 9.5 percent among Indian males in 1810 (p. 445).

Tanck downplays native resistance to the schools. Especially when a school was inaugurated, many pueblos thwarted plans for (what must have appeared to them) the unnecessary expense and intrusion of a Spanish-language school. With time, villagers often came to accept the expense as traditional. Accepting many Bourbon reports at face value, Tanck stresses the schools' effectiveness.

In my estimation, the Bourbons made little headway in educating the native population. Schools may have become accepted institutions in many Mexican villages, yet escuelas de primeras letras hardly proved the panacea Bourbon officials and church officials anticipated. At the start of the nineteenth century, despite decades of schooling, truancy remained common, few students became literate, and Nahuatl, Otomí, and Zapotec still reigned in the barrios and confessionals. On the eve of independence, Archbishop Lizana y Beaumont decried the fact that a confusa Babel de lenguas remained...

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